The New York Times this morning has a piece arguing that the Chicago teachers strike is a window on the nation's heart over the last few years, where education is concerned. I would say it's been 15 years at least, and in a weird way a lot of it started right here in Dallas.

In the mid-'90s Dallas was one of a few places nationally where a few freelance education researchers and activists, including our own Russell Fish, were focusing on so-called "anomalous schools" -- schools where kids were testing way better than they should have been according to all the usual indicators of income, family structure, transience and so on.

One of the stand-outs was Joseph J. Rhoads Elementary in South Dallas, where kids who should have been educational toast by fourth grade were out-performing rich white kids -- and way-out-performing other poor minority kids in the rest of the Dallas school system.

We wrote about it at the Observer in 1998. A really intriguing aspect of what we found was the way the issue came down on the traditional liberal/conservative matrix. It was the opposite of what might have been expected.

Liberals like former Governor Ann Richards, with very strong support from the teachers unions, were still saying the anomalous schools were a fluke and the only way to effectively teach poor kids was to end poverty ... which, of course, was impossible. So, you know: forget about it. Just try to maintain partial order until you retire.

It was then-governor George W. Bush and his education team who were calling bullshit. Armed with a huge data trove, a lot of it from Tennessee, where systematic testing had been going on for a decade, the Bush administration in Austin was saying the data proved that poor kids could be brought up to crucial educational levels by fourth grade.

Those fourth-grade achievement levels either allow or disallow success from the fourth grade on. They determine everything about the rest of a kid's destiny as an adult.
In our system, kids learn to read from K through third. From fourth grade on, they read to learn. If they can't read by fourth grade, they're toast.

Acting up is a way for them to preserve their dignity in a system that shoves evidence of their stupidity in their faces from fourth grade on until they get out. Some research indicates the smarter they are the worse they act.

That's where the Bush line came from about reading being the new civil right. I remember talking to these really bright people who were on Bush's education team, like Phyllis C. Hunter of Houston, his reading guru, and being sort of shocked out of my liberal skin.
I thought, "No, wait, listen. I am willing to believe anything bad about a Republican you tell me." I grew up in a Roosevelt liberal house. We were taught as children that Republicans were things that would reach out from under our beds and grab us by the ankles if we got up during the night.

But these people -- these Republicans -- were the ones who believed in the dignity, equality and promise of infant human beings who suffered the totally undeserved bad luck of being born into terrible circumstances. It was a flip. A one-eighty. A bucket of ice water on my head. I'm the son of a union teacher, and I never stopped and will never stop listening to or respecting teachers when they talk about their work.

But I couldn't stop my ears to what the Bush people were saying. They were saying, and I paraphrase, "We know how to teach these kids. It takes teacher training, not money. If we know how to do it, it's a sin not to do it."

And here is what really stopped me cold. I remember when Hunter told me this, I literally got chills. She said the other thing you have to have, in addition to the training, is an absolute conviction in your soul -- the certain knowledge -- that no matter how screwed up they were when they showed for school, these kids have it in them to be just as smart and just as accomplished as rich white kids.

The Bush people talked about the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations." That forced me to think of a certain kind of liberal compassion as ... what? The last bastion of racism? No! Say it isn't so.

Is there a point at which liberal compassion says to the kids, "We believe in and are deeply personally committed to your fundamental inferiority, and just to prove it we're going to forgive you for it?"

Bush went to Washington. Then 9/11 happened. All of "no-child" got lost in the shuffle. Rod Paige, the former Houston superintendent, Bush's education secretary, was a business success as well as an educator and a brilliant advocate of change. But Paige was dissed by the national press because his speech was southern black. Let's talk someday about the soft bigotry of New York/Washington media.

Today The New York Times is right. The Chicago teacher strike is a window on the national heart. Dr. Schutze looks into that bloody cavity and he is tempted to give a prescription of "triple bypass operation, psychotropic drugs for life." But remember this: Dr. Schutze is not a real doctor. Sometimes he would rather do invasive half-assed surgery than face certain unwelcome but insistent realities.

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No matter what any one of the trustees or spokesliars tell you, we are short-staffed (except for the aide handling Miles' Twitter account. Which Jennifer Sprague with her $185,000 salary can't seem to do for what good reason?).

Suburbs are starting to pay not just equal to DISD but MORE and suburbs are posting openings.

That sucking sound you hear is the suburbs slurping up new teachers.

Suburbs don't hire TFA and force veteran teachers to carry them by threatening to punish the school if the "team" fails.

Suburbs don't get new superintendents with completely new lesson plan, discipline, grading, and jargon systems every few years for the teachers to master overnight or during the convocation the Friday before school starts on Monday.

Most teachers live in the suburbs.

Stable--and therefore more likely to test well--families live in the suburbs.

When I see the Chicago parents worried about child care on tv I think, What did you expect?

Dump the problems of the world into the laps of those with no power and expect them to keep coming back for more?

Good luck going Reagan on them. There won't be people to replace them. The boomer generation Reagan had is retiring or has retired. That doesn't mean we should settle for terrible teachers, but maybe we'd better start listening to the good ones?

Give my students an ITBS test day Day One. Give them a test 90 days later or so. Then give them an ITBS test 180 days later. The growth will impress you.

But that's not how it is, and the Chicago teachers know it.

No matter how hard I work, I cannot, on the days before the ONE test,

-put the child to bed before midnight

-feed the child healthy meals

-prevent a mom from being released from a halfway house and reclaiming her child from the grandmother (has actually happened to my student)

-make sure the child has an antibiotic for their strep infection

-prevent an on-going divorce/arrest/eviction proceedings from freaking the child out

-promise the child that the deportation will not happen

etc.

DISD kids are fantastic. Smart, funny, creative, observant--you name it. But many of them face shocking challenges. To tie teacher evaluations to test scores, to REFUSE to recognize growth in a student despite the challenges they face, is unfair to the students.

And if a child scores 99% 5 years in a row and then drops to 95% in a harder grade level? The teacher is blamed.

I have a degree from a prestigious private college. I hold a certification in a subject area very few others could earn bc they couldn't pass the test. I'm not unqualified, and neither are most teachers. Many parts of the job simply cannot be done.

Miles and DISD are nitpicking teachers like never before. We have to leave our doors open no matter how noisy the halls are to impress visitors so they can "hear" the learning. We are evaluated on the Objective sentences we must write on the board for visitors--you can't believe the ridiculous nuances required to get a perfect score on those Objective sentences. Miles is all about impressing people for his NEXT job.

Why? Because that's all these high-priced education "experts" have to offer in the face of low test scores. Miles is paying an aide OVER $100,000 to deal with his Twitter account!! Meanwhile, some of us have 10 Special Ed kids mixed in with 15 non-Special Ed kids bc of inclusion laws. And you expect us to succeed?? With no help bc DISD won't hire more Special Ed teachers? Because they are paying an aide to keep up with Twitter??

Yes, poor kids are smart and can learn, but not if they are up all night. Not if they spend their Saturdays in the waiting room at a jail. Not if the entire family is consumed with yet another gang-related funeral, complete with t-shirts commemorating the awful loss.

There is a reason HP kids outscore poor kids, and it isn't the teachers. Move ANY of my students to a quiet, calm, lovely, child-centered home in HP and my students will beat the crap out of those kids. And they will be less pretentious to boot.

It's not a soft bigotry to say, "Hey, we really are working hard in here! Quit yelling at us!"

Teachers' problem is they convinced themselves and everybody else that they are the key factor in student performance as justification for much higher salaries and benefits. Now people say let's see results. The sad truth is that individual teachers are best 5th or 6th on the list of driving factors against student performance. Starting with basic intelligence of the student, you go through parental involvement, family income, coherent administration of basics before teachers start having an impact. In any process engineering discussion, you do not jump to factor 5 because 1-4 are too tough. That direction is a recipe for spinning your wheels, wasting time and money, and getting nothing done.
Teaching needs to go back to what it always was: a modestly paid civil service job where you put in your 30 and left. Imagine acting like the bus person at a restaurant is going to make or break the place. You can double his salary, do customer satisfaction surveys up the wazoo, "counsel" the bus boy and it still will not make any difference except create a highly stressed and frustrated bus boy.

I'm afraid Michael McNaughton's very important comment will get buried at the bottom of the stack, so I am cut and pasting it here. He said:

The room is getting crowded with all of the elephants we pretend not to notice...race, class, money, poverty. Board Prez Lew Blackburn gives a tepid response to Mike Miles putting principals on notice that coaches need to teach first and coach second (yes, the coaches receive a stipend for that coaching above their regular pay). The practice of loading schools with "coaches" has been so ingrained that it can only merit a "so what?" from Lew. Hillcrest, at one point, had 13 TAs, monitors, coaches, etc. all tied to the athletic program and (partially) paid for with Title I funds. The administration certainly knew because they had to approve the master schedule that gave a Teaching Assistant to help with Coaches English 3 class. I keep thinking that we are in that brief moment of silence between whacking the wasps nest and hearing the drone of thousands of stinging harpies that will come flooding out to attack the whacker...is Miles unaware of Friday Night Lights in Texas? I am thrilled to see Miles making the first strike against the existing culture at DISD by putting principals on notice that they, too, will be held responsible. I firmly believe that the pyramid needs to be inverted and that teachers should drive their classroom budgets, make local hiring decisions, use the best teaching techniques geared towards their individual classes and be freed from micro-managers who "make work" to justify their management positions. Mr. Miles' challenge will be to take a group of managers who do not have a clue how to manage and convince them that supporting teachers is their real job.

The other group that we run the risk of failing is the teachers themselves. If we don't provide the training and resources necessary for teachers to improve their classroom instruction, then we will fail the students and the public servants who teach them.

Russell Fish was on the trail of ITBS scores back then which have absolutely nothing to do with dumbed down state accountability testing which has turned into the military industrial complex of our time (quoting the former TEA comissioner whom we can assume had the proper republian credentials). Can't fail an ITBS test, dumbass, but state tests and NCLB aren't run that way.

Poor kids and minority kids are as segregated as Jim Crow, and Jim S wants to pretend that's progress.

Name a test that everyone can pass, Schutze. That's an absurdity. Either it's so stupid, the entire cast of Monty Python could stumble over it laying on the ground or some major part of the tested population will fail it. Now assume schools live and die by a crummy state-made test with no validity. Now we have NCLB which has made Sandy Kress, a two-bit attorney, a huge amount of money. Get it--Schutze--in a state that is driving teachers in the ground with oversized classes, we have half a billion for testing.

There is no public education system in the US that has been made better by this sham. There is no research to indicate more testing equals better learning. SAT scores have been flat for over a decade. DCCCD is filled with remedial kids who seldom make it out with a degree.

Schutze--find a parent who tells the story you have devised--that NCLB helped their kid to a better education and I'll eat that child's diploma.

@MikeWestEast You happen to be utterly wrong. All of the data -- no longer even considered controversial by anyone in the field -- show that teachers are the number one factor, way ahead of family, income, environment, all the other stuff. The teachers, by the way, are arguing on your side: they say they can't be held responsible for all that other stuff, when, in fact, the other stuff is way less relevant than they are. Smartest thing we could do is pay the best ones like rock stars.

@jerikjonsson Another thing Phyllis Hunter told me was that firing so-called bad teachers was stupid and unproductive. She said the ed schools don't even teach teachers how to teach reading. It was much cheaper and better bang for the buck to hire subs, pull the teachers out of class for re-training and keep the ones you've got. The lust to fire teachers is all tied up in partisan racial bullshit that has no linkage with practice.

@liberalsareracist conservatives want everyone poor and stupid so they'll work for shit wages and do as they're told. They are also racist and sexist in their belief that people who disagree with them are stupid. Nah-nah nah-nah.

@udontknowmuch Well, yes, no,. maybe. Russell was on the trail of the normed tests that show what's really getting done, as well as the data in Tennessee showing that teaching is way more important than income or family background or parental involvement -- so important that it overwhelms those factors, for better or for worse. I'm not here to defend the state tests. But, look, udontknowmuch, you sound to me like you know this issue. So you know better than most what kind of intellectual dishonesty it is to point to some and bad tests and say they prove testing itself is no good, therefore teacher performance is a fiction and it's all up to the parents. Your arguments against the state tests may be valid, but don't pimp them out to serve job security for bad teachers.

@everlastingphelps I wonder if public service unions and Democrats from all across the country will rally to Chicago to occupy City Hall, and attempt to recall the Mayor. Oh wait, the Mayor is none other than liberal hero and crony of the president, Rahm Emanuel. Move along folks, nothing to see here, just a little in house discussion......

@JimSX @MikeWestEast You misread the conclusions of the research. Teachers are the most important IN SCHOOL factor affecting performance. That status does not make them the most important overall by a long shot. Still the teachers are communicating conflicting messages. People pay surgeons a fortune because he or she is as close to God as you will find walking amongst us, his or her talent overcoming all obstacles. Ifs teacher is really closer to a lifeboat helmsman, then we do not need to concern ourselves with their professional status. If you want the money, you have to be the change agent, the indispensable actor, the risk taker and bone breaker. Step up or step off.

@JimSX@MikeWestEast DId you keep your child up all night before the SAT test? Did you take your child to the dr. when he was sick?

A good teacher--no matter how good--CANNOT control those things for a 1 time test and a couple of kids (the way the current system is structured) can tank a school and a teacher.

It's not testing, per se. First, we HAVE to follow DISD's curriculum. You wouldn't believe the stuff the nepotism-hires in the curric dept force us to leave out or put in.

Just last year, the Science department got caught requiring middle school science teachers to teach a concept NOT TESTED UNTIL 10TH GRADE. Why? Because the curriculum people actually did not understand the terminology they themselves were using.

Meanwhile, those teachers didn't have enough time to teach the stuff actually on the test!!

We cannot fight the test, the curriculum department, the patrolling Nazis who make sure our doors are open and our Objectives meet Miles' strange standard, the athletic interests, the Special Ed laws, the ELP laws, the Title ! requirements, classes of 35, fights with no hall monitors, and parents in jail.

And 99.9% of private school and suburban parents get it. They see what is going on in urban districts and they move. It is Sisyphean.

Agreed. The bloodlust to fire teachers does not spring from any pure motives. We are not as a country out to rid ourselves of law schools, shoddy medical schools, or a host of other ills. Teachers have no mouthpiece or point person to explain the conditions in their current profession. Sorry, they no longer have a profession. They can't communicate the conditions in their jobs.

@observist I was spoofing Jim about the party dogma he mentioned in his article, and which he implied he bought into, such as:

1."That forced me to think of a certain kind of liberal compassion as ... what? The last bastion of racism? No! Say it isn't so."

2."We believe in and are deeply personally committed to your fundamental inferiority, and just to prove it we're going to forgive you for it?"

3."No, wait, listen. I am willing to believe anything bad about a Republican you tell me."

4."Liberals like former Governor Ann Richards, with very strong support from the teachers unions, were still saying the anomalous schools were a fluke and the only way to effectively teach poor kids was to end poverty ... which, of course, was impossible. So, you know: forget about it. Just try to maintain partial order until you retire."

Don't know of any teachers who wish to be in the company of bad teachers, but heck, we didn't hire them, we have no control over keeping them, and their presence tends to relate to family trees, lazy ass principals, and plain inertia. But again, we didn't choose them to be in our midst.

"point to some bad tests and prove testing is no good..." What if these were medical tests that didn't diagnose too well or were simply correlated to how white you are or how middle class your mommy is. So what if your liver is shot and they don't point you anywhere near the right direction for help? What if the ability of your doctor to diagnose and prescribe treatments were based solely on faulty tests? Gotta a problem there? How about if your job depended on them? Any issues with that?

@JimSX@udontknowmuch@jerikjonsson I'm always ambivalent about unionism. The mission of the unions tends to start with a struggle for human dignity and end with lazy nest feathering. Democrats only see the beginning and Republicans only see the end.

It started in the day a factory worker could lose a hand in a stamping machine and the employer would say "Tough break... now get out of the way and let an able-bodied worker run that machine." and continued until public universities have to pay a union electrician $75/hour to remove outlet covers before a union painter will paint a classroom.

@udontknowmuch@jerikjonsson And therein lie all of the valid, important, crucial reasons for teachers to have good strong unions. It is also a torture of logic to say you disagree with the unions on testing, therefore there should be no unions.

Our public school systems are now more segregated by race and social class than at any other time in American history. Threatening teachers with firing because of low test scores that directly correlate to the income and race of students is putting a big sign on inner city urban school districts that states, "If you value your career, don't teach here. You have slim chances of success based on our testing system. Go to the suburbs and take your talents with you. It's safer there."

Don't confuse the Tennessee studies with NCLB outcomes. Getting student growth is a noble aim and with the appropriate resources can be done. But NCLB doesn't look at growth. It assumes all children progress at the same rate FROM THE SAME STARTING LINE and will arrive at the same outcomes.

That is not possible or logical, but we are beating principals and teachers over the head trying to achieve an impossible goal and one that is not even worthy.

@udontknowmuch Is there a specific medical problem that stands in the way of teaching poor children to read? But, no, don't answer that. Go back to Jim Crow. You accused of me of something that sounded a lot like being a segregationist. hey, I'm over 21, got a thick skin, I can take it. Just explain it to me. You keep kind of ducking away from it here.

An answer for what, your sophomoric fantasies or the conundrum of delivering high quality educational services to every child?

If the latter, the Tennessee research was based on STUDENT GROWTH, not the dichotomy of right answer, wrong answer that is the basis of the Kress deformities. The Tennessee studies and their results were based on THREE years of outcome measures, not annual testing that can result in false bleeps and blips. The researcher in Tennessee never intended the extrapolation that one sole teacher against a universe of problems related to poverty, special ed issues, mobility, lack of resources, lack of even air conditioning, horrible principals, other poor instructor...that one teacher can consistently overcome all these evils.

Poor people tend to have a host of medical issues unrelated to the quality of their physicians and their physicians have much better mojo available in terms of resources than does the second grade teacher in portable 5 with no supply money.

@Scruffygeist@James080 It is my understanding that in Chicago (and many other areas of the country), the schools are actually ran by the city government (which has a strong mayor, and either a weak or no city manager).

@JimSX@everlastingphelps Just pointing out the hypocrisy. When Republicans in Wisconsin reigned in their public service unions, organized labor and Democrats launched a nationwide reaction, supporting recall petitions, protests and funding opposition campaigns (which mostly failed). So where is the nationwide support for the Chicago teacher's union?